11 Responses

Looks great! I’m assuming this will become the default photo application on gnome, replacing shotwell. Any clues on how easy or difficult it’ll be for shotwell users to move to this app? (I may have asked this previously already, not sure).

Shotwell is a popular 3rd party GNOME application from Yorba, while Photos is a core GNOME application. What it means that you can expect to have GNOME without Shotwell, but not without Photos because other parts of the desktop can rely on it being there. eg., search from GNOME Shell or the background panel in Settings, etc..

Nothing stops you from installing Shotwell over on top of GNOME (with Photos), however. In fact that is something that lets Yorba add value on top of GNOME, and keeps the door open for them to generate revenue via an app store (for example), something that they touched upon during their keynote at GUADEC.

If we were to morph Shotwell into Photos, in the same way as Epiphany became Web, we would have to re-engineer the UI significantly to match the GNOME 3 UX, and adjust its feature set. This always creates tension among the existing userbase. And Shotwell, being as popular as it is, I don’t think that is a good idea. We want to be able to re-iterate quickly and have the freedom to fail. [1]

At the end of the day, it does not hurt to have both Shotwell and Photos around at the same time. F-Spot has been dead for a long time now. Eye of GNOME will eventually be replaced by a combination of Sushi and Photos. [2]

[1] We do share *a lot* of code with Documents and Eye of GNOME.
[2] This has been discussed with the Eye of GNOME developers.

I have tried gnome-photos 3.8 today, the first impression is nice, however I was not able to figure out how to create an album and some heavy pictures (> 3 or 4 mb) make the app really slow responsible